Cookie Notice

WE LOVE THE NATIONS OF EUROPE

However, this blog is a US service and this site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse.

Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Could Putin be in line for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Nobody can make any mistake that Vladimir Putin is a ruthless ex-KGB achiever with a record of state murder and brutality on his watch. However, his stunning move yesterday in announcing the withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria must surely make him a candidate for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. If so, he would join the EU, Yassar Arafat and Henry Kissinger in being amongst the improbable recipients of the entertaining award. The only other person equally qualified is Tony Blair. On a serious note, the move is also a slap to the cretinous Assad. If Assad had allowed limited political reform at the time of the 'arab spring' the terrible war could have been averted. Even now, going into the peace process, Assad's stubborn intransigence threatens to derail a deal - but with only conditional Russian backing, Assad must learn that he is now just a Russian puppet and must do as he's told. If that means splitting off a part of Sunni Syria, so be it.

If Putin's action helps broker a peace deal, cuts the flow of displaced persons to Turkey and thence to Greece, and incidentally helps save the career of Angela Merkel, he will have achieved as much as any previous recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. And if even one human life is saved, one family kept safely in their home, then it is all worth it.

15 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It could be that, President Putin's latest ruse not only undermines his allies new found bravado - without Russian material and expertise on the battlefield and coordinated air supremacy then, surely al Assad will/should now come to the negotiating table or, maybe not.

Putin's quick, brutal lesson in how to conduct an effective blasting on some Syrian counter insurgency AGAIN lays the west open to ridicule, highlighting its failure in all of their recent adventures attempting intervention.

Russia, has pretty much secured its real goal to augment the defences and protecting its only access to the Mediterranean sea in Latakia, helped also to bolster and secure al Assad's power base and securing Syrian Alouite access to the coastal corridor and with its mountain fastness.

What really needs to happen:

Obarmy, Merkel and Camoron/dough boy need to lean heavily on madman Erdogan and the Qataris-Gulf funders and supporters of Isis and al Nusra to inform them to halt their meddling in matters not of their province.Russia, to do the same with Iran and various other parties not least Hezbollah.

Syria needs, peace declaring and a settlement, a canton-isation, of autonomous regions. Syrians have to sip tea with each other.

Putin has very likely made demands of, and received the assurances from, the EU and USA before he made this decision.

The Western powers were very much on the back foot when Aleppo fell and Assad took the upper hand (thanks to Putin) but Putin has his own agenda and is more than prepared to sacrifice Assad to achieve them.

All this indicates to me (rightly or wrongly) is that PUTIN is the one in control and everyone else is simply trying to keep up (and save face).

Putin is smart not to risk getting bogged down in an ugly situation and to reduce the risk of war with Turkey.

Timely declaration will hopefully force Assad to accept some sort of compromise; whether the rebels will as well is a moot point - the alternative is years more of agony but political leaders rarely give much of a shit about the agopny of the little people. And especially in this part of the world.

As was commented above it will be interesting to see what sort of quid pro quo has been agreed upon with other Western leaders, and it is unlikely to be anything good.

A lesson in how to fight a limited campaign targeting infrastructure with a precision that even NATO military planners conceded was remarkable and highly effective. What is not reported is the training carried out by Russian instructors. Several battalions of locally sourced and trained soldiers have been put to use since January; sweeping through small towns and gaining a fearsome reputation when dealing with IS - and its affiliates. Each platoon is led by a Spetnatz NCO and the civilian locals are only too glad to point out the positions of the headchoppers - many of whom are now decamping to Libya, or are waiting in line at a welfare office somewhere in Europe.

Another change that helped swing the war:

The Rebirth of the Syrian Arab Army

http://www.voltairenet.org/article190703.html

NATO fail:

West failed to factor in Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian backers as the conflict developed

"Targeting infrastructure:? precision? a few thousand dumb bombs and a sprinkling of cluster munitions equals dead civilians,don't make me laugh.Plus a one nil victory on the aircraft front to sultan Erdogan doesn't seem much of a result.

Precise targeting or, not, What Russian airpower does not concede to are terrorists using human shields and buildings to wait out, shelter from bombing raids. Thus if Russian intelligence finds out a school building is being used by, sheltering infiltrators not aligned with al Assad, the building is then removed - that's what is meant by precise bombing, that the local area is reduced to rubble described by western forces as was, as 'collateral damage'.

Hands tied.

It's what the west should do but can't, thanks to, due in no small part to some very stupid rules of engagement foisted on its military and via 'international conventions' to which the idiot western virtue signalling politicians/Nomenklatura signed up dutifully under various UN stricture. Where, any blood crazed Salafist, terrorist will never recognize but which restrict western forces. All of this, bolstered, reinforced by the international ambulance chasers sensing blood - litigious Paki legal teams (yuman rites scum)and no doubt funded in part with western taxpayers and Arab money.

Ultimately, there can be, there are no rules - Isis don't recognize them and the Russians said, "that's fine by us".

Russia, nigh on, albeit on far smaller scale did to certain Syrian groups what they did to the Germans, ie, blasted them off the face of the earth and isn't that what war is about? The west went soft, that's why it gets bogged down and defeated - worse; riddled, shot down by bullets from its own side.

Then consider, how would Russia deal with a refugee crisis eg the Greco-Turk crossing? A human tidal wave....rushing towards its borders, would the Russians even allow them to land, I rather think not, don't you?If you give em free benefits, tell them all to come, and again western Europe: is writing its own suicide not

Yes, Anon et al. The other daft thing the US-led West has done is to train them in our own methods of warfare. Oh, I know, they only trained the ones who were fighting our enemies ... right; how naive is that?

If only the USA had backed their less than perfect friend the Shah of Iran all those years ago the Mohammedans would not have got so uppity over the years and the Middle East would be a much better place IMHO.

I think that many people are stuck in the Cold War mindset of Russia as the big bad bogeyman. Our PR- driven politicians know that raising the scare inclines people to favour the EU. They spotted this at the time of Russia's resumption of control over Crimea.Incidentally I forecast in 2009 that this would happen. It's about 8 minutes in on an in depth interview entitled " Germany, the EU, the Disunited Kingdom and the Democratic Deficit" in the video section on www.eurosceptic.org.uk .

From a Russian point of view the behaviour of the West has been of ever closer encirclement, moving missile batteries ever closer to Moscow and St Petersburg. NATO's first unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 began a series of disastrous destabilising " humanitarian interventions" - Iraq, Afghanistan ,Libya.

The destabilisation of Ukraine had the objective of depriving Russia of it warm water " spring board into the Mediterranean" at Sebastopol.Victoria Nuland, US Assistant a Secretary of State, boasted of spending 5!billion dollars on the project. The EU and German secret service are also deeply involved.

The proxy war on the Syrian regime, supported by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States with US encouragement, has the same aim - the deprivation of Russia's naval base in Syria.

It's not political insight but I have a friend , an old fashioned Church of England Tory, who has taught in Russian schools for the last ten years or so. He finds his teaching most enjoyable and speaks very highly of his Russian colleagues' professional standards. Support for Putin, he says, runs very high.

I doubt whether it is possible to rule Russia by Western methods, particularly in the face of deliberate Western pressure and intrusion into " the near abroad". Just imagine America's likely response to the attempted installation of a pro Russian regime in Mexico!